Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

cliwiki: Needing attention

I try to be as honest as possible when I look over software. If it seems like I’m too-often enthusiastic about programs, it’s probably because the ones that were less than gratifying were cast aside out of frustration.

I’ll list cliwiki though, since I sense it has a little potential, and a tool that pulls pages from Wikipedia is worth pursuing.

I don’t recall where I got the link to cliwiki, but my assessment is that it needs more attention. Here’s why:

The few arguments cliwiki claims to support produce nothing. The home page suggests potd, featured and onthisday, but none of those generates any different results.

cliwiki requires you answer a prompt to trigger the search. You can’t tack on the topic as a command line argument.

cliwiki incorporates no pager, and because of the prompt, it’s exceedingly difficult to page or redirect the output of very long pages.

Because of those shortcomings, I’ve tried to funnel cliwiki into text files with the standard > mark or a pipe symbol, but the prompt confounds things. I get half-formed pages or worse, lockups. For what it’s worth I’ve also tried to echo my search topic into a text file and use < and xargs in one fashion or another, with no real success.

All of this means to me that cliwiki is only half-formed, and partially useful on pages that don’t overflow your terminal window. I daresay on very shallow screens it will be nigh-on useless.

cliwiki does do some things right; I like that it lists links at the end of the page, and adds links to images in the text. But cliwiki still needs a bit more work before it’s functional, either to the degree it promises or to a point of usability.